Work

I have worked in many mediums over the years, including things like VJing, design, sound art, DJIng, curating, and human-computer interaction research. What all of these things have in common is my unrelenting curiousity about how technology affects society and our perceptions of social space.

I am currently focused on my VJing practice, and I have enjoyed some fantastic trips overseas lately where I was performing, making VJ and music video clips, and networking with my peers internationally. I love performing at electronic music events in Saskatchewan, though – my heart has been here for a long time…about 15 years I have been doing performances here, I suppose.

My History

I started out doing performance art at raves in the mid-90s, followed by a radio show on the local community radio station here in Saskatoon, CFCR 90.5 FM. My all night experimental electronic music show, called Deep Nocturnal Trance Missions, lasted for about 8 years, until I decided to focus my energies elsewhere. About the same time I started radio DJing, I performed at my first rave as a DJ. This was a really exciting time in rave culture, everyone was so optimistic and vibrant! I would often combine performance art with my DJ sets, asking my beloved friends to do the most unusual things while I was playing my music. I DJed almost exclusively on turntables, three turntables preferably. That’s when I got the name “Lady Gates”, which some people still call me. Around 1999, I started to get more serious about producing my own sound art and doing more unusual things with turntables. I started to work with contact microphones after a workshop/performance at MUTEK, and combined it with my turntablism practice to create my own record needles that I could draw on records with. I also started doing vinyl record sculptures around this time and later ended up curating a show on the topic with an international roster at Regina’s Art Projects Gallery. During all of this, I was quite active in the local noise music community, and a handful of us (Jake Hardy, Jon Vaughn, Max Haiven…) were putting on a lot of weird little shows around town that were gathering more and more attention. In 2002, Dermot Wilson (the Director of Paved Arts at the time) gave Jon Vaughn and I the opportunity to curate our first big show, Digidome, in a huge golf dome.